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Thursday March 28, 2024

The third party in Kashmir

Another sad chapter was added to the acrimonious history of India and Pakistan on August 23, 2015 when the curtain was drawn on the NSAs meeting. The suspense over the talks started building up after Pakistan invited the Hurriyet to a reception meeting with Sartaj Aziz. India saw it as

By our correspondents
September 05, 2015
Another sad chapter was added to the acrimonious history of India and Pakistan on August 23, 2015 when the curtain was drawn on the NSAs meeting. The suspense over the talks started building up after Pakistan invited the Hurriyet to a reception meeting with Sartaj Aziz. India saw it as a violation of the ‘redline’ it had drawn at the time of the cancellation of secretary-level talks in 2014.
Statements from the two sides, hyped up by the nationalistic corporate media, cast their shadow on these talks. And finally the press conferences by the Pakistan NSA, Sartaj Aziz, and India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj wrote an epitaph on these talks. In his press conference Sartaj Aziz – saying no to any preconditions, including the ‘redlines’ – showed his readiness for the meeting. Sushma Swaraj, by invoking the Simla Agreement over Pakistan inviting the Hurriyet, sparked a whole new debate. All that calls for revisiting this 43-year-old agreement.
Swaraj raised two points. One, that ‘in the spirit of the Simla Agreement, there can be no third party, and keeping in mind the spirit of the Simla Agreement, don’t make Hurriyet a third party to talks and second. That in the spirit of the Ufa statement, the NSA-level talks would be limited to terrorism. Pakistan is saying that Kashmir is core issue but they did not say so in Ufa. Talk on terror first, we can talk on Kashmir later.’ The second point is not the subject of this column.
Since the birth of the Hurriyet Conference, in 1993, it is for the first time that the government of India has officially seen it as a ‘third party’ to the Kashmir dispute. The party – now split in four factions – has at no point pleaded for itself the status of a ‘third party’. Unlike its predecessors, the multi-party combine does not see implementation of the UN resolutions as the only solution to the dispute.
Talking about “its struggle directed against” what it terms as “the forcible and fraudulent occupation of the State by India and for achievement of self-determination” in its constitution in Chapter 2 clause II, it talks about making endeavours for an alternative negotiated settlement amongst all the three parties – India, Pakistan and the People of Jammu and Kashmir – under the auspices of the UN or any other friendly countries. Provided that such settlement reflects “the will and aspiration of the people”.
Seen in the right perspective, the party does not consider itself the third party but recognises the people of Jammu and Kashmir as a principal party to the dispute. This stand in fact is in the spirit of the commitment made by the first governor general, Lord Mountbatten, and the then prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru to people of the state. That ‘the question of accession of the state will be settled by reference to people under international auspices like the United Nations”. In fact, it has been the National Front, NDA and UPA governments that by entering into dialogue with the Hurriyet leaders both on Track I and Track-II fronts have tacitly recognised the multi-party combine as the ‘third party’.
The idea of a Delhi-Srinagar, Srinagar-Islamabad dialogue was not born in Srinagar but in New Delhi. Ironically, it was I K Gujral, prime minister of India (1997-1998) who in 1996 inaugurated Office of the Hurriyet Conference in New Delhi. The setting up of this office was seen as an opportunity for promoting dialogue between New Delhi and Srinagar both by the establishment and the political dispensation in the Indian capital.
Having repeatedly said that the UNSC resolutions on Jammu and Kashmir and agreements including the Karachi Agreement have lost their relevance, New Delhi’s stated position on the Simla Agreement so far has been that it continues to be in force. For the last four decades it has hinged India-Pakistan relations to this agreement, thus wittingly or unwittingly recognising that the Kashmir problem is the fulcrum in our relations. So Sushma Swaraj chose a wrong alibi in stating that making Hurriyet the ‘third party’ was against the spirit of the Simla Agreement for cancelling the NSA level talks. Not to speak of involving the Hurriyet in the dialogue process for the ‘final settlement’ of the Kashmir dispute, the Simla Agreement read in the right spirit does not make the Kashmir dispute just a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan.
The deliberations between June 28 and July 3, 1971 between India and Pakistan belie many a propaganda about this agreement. The drafts exchanged between the teams of the counties, the exchange of ideas both during closed-door meetings and outside the meeting halls and the final agreement signed at the Simla Conference reveal that fundamentally there has been no change with the principles laid down by the United Nations for the resolution of the problem; it has only proposed an alternative way out for addressing it.
In its initial draft India had omitted reference to the charter of the United Nations and had incorporated the final settlement of Jammu and Kashmir in it. Pakistan did not want to Kashmir to be brought on the table as the conference was about the return of the POWs and taking armies back to before-war positions on the international border and the Ceasefire Line. After the first draft, a couple of drafts were exchanged and discussed by the two teams. However, in the Simla Agreement, that was signed at midnight on July 3, 1972, the first paragraph reads: “That the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations shall govern relations between the two countries.”
Thus, the very first paragraph of the Simla Agreement binds the two countries to ‘fulfil in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the Charter’. Under this very charter India had taken the dispute to the UNSC which had adopted resolutions for holding a plebiscite in the state. So paragraph one of the Simla Agreement makes it incumbent on India to respect and implement the UN resolution on Jammu and Kashmir. In paragraph 4(ii) the incorporation of the words “without prejudice to the recognized position of either side”, by Bhutto in his own handwriting ended all talk about the line of control having the status of a de facto border.
In paragraph 1 (ii), the phrase “or by any other means” after the phrase “bilateral negotiations” gives the two countries freedom to get the dispute resolved through the ‘third party’ mediation as well. In the last paragraph of the agreement, the two countries had agreed that their ‘respective heads will meet at a mutually convenient date to discuss the final settlement of Jammu and Kashmir’. This in itself nailed the propaganda that changing the nomenclature from Ceasefire Line to the Line of Actual Control had changed the status of the Kashmir dispute.
In times when both India and Pakistan were committed to holding the plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir, and Nehru had not reneged his promise to the people of Jammu and Kashmir, and envoys appointed by the UN were exploring the possibility of demilitarisation and plebiscite, India and Pakistan were also simultaneously engaged in bilateral talks. So when the Simla Agreement agreed to discuss Kashmir bilaterally, there was nothing new in that.
The two countries knew full well that a bilateral agreement cannot replace international agreements. That is why neither New Delhi nor Islamabad formally brought this agreement before the UNSC, where Jammu and Kashmir continues to be on the agenda as a dispute. In fact, the myth of bilateralism tagged to the Simla Agreement has been punctured on a number of occasions.
The writer is a freelance contributor based in Srinagar.
Email: zahidgm@gmail.com